The Tibor de Nagy Gallery
is pleased to present new paintings by Richard Baker. The exhibition marks his
third with the gallery. It will comprise
small to large paintings of still lifes, many of them set before Cape Cod and Long Island landscapes. The paintings are populated with
flowers—often tulips, books, old magazines, and photographs of family members
and some well-known faces, carefully arranged across tabletops.
Although Baker’s paintings
are born out of keen observation and maintain fidelity to the objects at hand,
he often upends the picture by ignoring traditional perspective, tilting the
table toward the viewer. The objects defy gravity and remain in place. As a result the still life elements often
appear to float, part of the pictorial space and yet part of another. This
gives his work a surreal quality that is rarely associated with still life
painting today
Richard
Baker has exhibited widely throughout the United States. He attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston and the Maryland Institute, College of Art,
Baltimore. He
has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the Pollock
Krasner Foundation Grant and the New England Foundation for the Arts Grant.
The Tibor de Nagy Gallery
is pleased to present its second exhibition of paintings by the celebrated
Icelandic painter Louisa Matthiasdottir. The artist is known for her realist
paintings that employ a vibrant palette and a strong geometric structure. The exhibition will comprise a selection of small,
loosely painted landscapes, some of which were created as studies for larger
paintings.
Now considered a national
treasure in her native Iceland,
the artist was a prominent younger member of country’s first avant-garde. She went on to study in Paris
and Copenhagen, and eventually moved in 1942 to New York where she
studied under Hans Hofmann. Along with a
group of fellow former Hofmann students, including Robert de Niro, Larry
Rivers, Nell Blaine, and Jane Freilicher, she helped to foster a new sense of
relevance for representational painting.
The artist’s work has been exhibited and collected widely
throughout the United States
and in Iceland. Her paintings are included in many private
and public collections, including the Tate Gallery, London,
the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden.
In the spring of 2009, the artist’s work
was the subject of an exhibition at the Reykjavik Museum.
The gallery is pleased to present a forty-year retrospective of works by Paris-based American abstract painter Shirley Jaffe.The exhibition is the artist’s third with the gallery.
Jaffe’s large-scale geometric abstractions are inspired by what she sees day to day in the urban
Paris landscape.This vision is translated ultimately into colorful shapes and scriptive lines, set against generous white grounds, creating playful and balanced compositions.Although Jaffe’s artistic process usually entails many months of struggle, once the artist locks in the compositions, the seamless matte surfaces of the paintings show no signs of their evolution.
The artist arrived in
Paris in 1949; in the decades that followed, Jaffe established herself among a circle of American artists living in
Paris including Sam Francis, Ellsworth Kelly, and Joan Mitchell.Jaffe has enjoyed an increasing international following in recent years, and her work was the subject of two major museum retrospectives in the last year.
In the exhibition catalogue, Carolyn Lanchner, retired Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, writes:
Jaffe’s manipulation of the visual takes the basics, lines, forms, colors, and allows them every freedom her extraordinary imagination can devise, while vigilantly suppressing any errant tendencies towards tactile effects on a uniformly flat surface without material density […] Explaining her procedures, she once described how she holds off as long as possible choosing among the “myriad solutions” that occur to her during the making of a painting. In this discovery of her picture in the moments of its execution, she sees herself extending Abstract Expressionism’s tradition of considered spontaneity.
Among others, Jaffe’s work is in the collection of the
Museum of
Modern Art,
New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou,
Paris, where one of her paintings was recently included in the exhibition “elles@centrepompidou - Women Artists in the Collections of the Centre Pompidou.”
The gallery will present an exhibition of the artist’s recent work at the ADAA Art Show, March 2– 6, Booth A-12.
The Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new ceramic sculptures and works on paper by Kathy Butterly. The exhibition is the artist’s fourthwith the gallery and will comprise fourteen new sculptures that were completed over the last year. Known for her diminutive (but large in scale) ceramic vessels, the works in this exhibition measure no taller than seven inches.
In a shift from her earlier sculptures which were often brightly colored with glazes of electric pinks, blues, and oranges, this new body of work has a restrained palette, marked by subtle shifts in tone. The artist attributes this change to the recent Morandi exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum and her response to it. As she completed the sculptures and grouped them on a shelf, she came to recognize a new cohesion that did not previously exist when her colors had a broader range. In essence, the pieces came together and became still lifes in their own right.
Kathy Butterly has exhibited widely across the United States and in Europe. She received a B.F.A. from Moore College of Art in Philadelphia and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis, where she studied with, and was later the studio assistant to, Robert Arneson. A 2009 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant, her work is represented in numerous museum collections including The Detroit Institute of Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the de Young Museum, San Francisco. Her work was also included in the 2004 Carnegie International.
Tara Geer, Colter Jacobsen, Jon Shelton: Current Drawing
The gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of three emerging artists whose main focus is drawing and are exhibiting at the gallery for the first time.
Tara Geer is a New York City-based artist who finds endless beauty and possibility in the small, often-overlooked details of daily life. Working principally in charcoal, pencil and chalk, the artist explains that her drawings are “love letters to looking, but wordless ones.” Ms. Geer received her BA and MFA from Columbia University.
San Francisco-based artist Colter Jacobsen uses an idiosyncratic collection of found source material to create drawings. He is represented in this exhibition by a selection of drawings from the recently published collection of short stories by Denton Welch and Jane Bowles, entitled A Stick of Green Candy (Four Corners Books). His drawings are carefully crafted and meticulously drawn. Having earned his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, his work has been included in several exhibitions throughout the United States and in London.
American ex-pat artist Jon Shelton, who has made Cologne, Germany his home for nearly two decades, presents a series of small, highly-detailed and often humorous portrayals of insects in various costumes and guises. His work blends the quiet, careful hand of a fine artist with the polished imagery of corporate marketing and branding. The artist received his MFA in printmaking from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and his work is represented in public collections in Germany and Switzerland.
Trevor Winkfield moved to New York from his native England in 1969. The artist
combines in his paintings strikingly absurdist and unpredictable juxtapositions
of disparate images, all rendered in a flat graphic style. His paintings often hint at narratives,
although they can also be read as carefully constructed abstractions with
recognizable objects worked in the compositions.
Winkfield’s work has been
the subject of over fifteen solo exhibitions throughout the United States. He has received numerous awards, including a
Pollock-Krasner Award and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Fellowship. In 2002, Winkfield was
awarded the Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres by the French
government. The artist has written extensively about art and until this year
was a co-editor of The Sienese Shredder,
a journal on art and literature.
The Tibor
de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present Town and Country, curated by gallery artist Trevor Winkfield. A select group of the artist’s paintings
completed over the last decade will also be on view in the second gallery.
As opposed to an inclusive
survey, Town and Country was
conceived as, “a sampling of souvenirs from both rural and urban areas spanning
over 100 years.”
Trevor Winkfield elaborates:
Working
inland from the coast, we first come across a cliff view of the Irish sea by Jack Yeats, painted around 1920, followed by
a recent freshwater close-up of fish by photographer Susan Unterberg. No doubt
Elliott Green's amorphous monsters lurk nearby, too. The Neo-Romantic Graham
Sutherland takes us through entangled foliage, beneath which one would not be
at all surprised to find horse chestnuts scattered by Jean Hélion, or Thomas
Jones' vegetables growing. Beyond Jonathan Lasker's abstract trees and those of
Albert York we find the first intimations of human dwelling in Denton Welch's
eerie Coffin House (painted in wartime
Britain),
a prelude to the squat suburban house of David Deutsch, against which Arthur
Dove's ladder might be conveniently propped.
Marcel's
sister, Suzanne Duchamp, shows us a Dada factory as seen in 1920, just across
the way from another dwelling by Charles Burchfield (surrounded by a Marsden
Hartley fence). Entertainment is provided by Paul Signac's landmark
pointillist
theater programme (1888), and perhaps by Louis Eilshemius's
lascivious
nude at rest. An altogether more serious nude (and one of her strangest) by
Jane Freilicher points us once more towards the ocean, where moons by Stephen
Mueller will soon rise, followed somewhat later by a snowfall courtesy of Snowflake Bentley. Finally, Gregory
Crane's four-panel homage to the seasons brings together town and country,
both.
